Charen missed mark

In Sunday’s Mining Journal, columnist Mona Charen audaciously asserts that President Obama displays incompetence on the international scene.

Her premise for this assertion includes North Korea’s “menaces and episodic threats,” Turkish protesters, Islamist movements gaining power and Russia’s Putin acting like a thug. She offers no explanation as to how the president could better control these situations.

North Korea’s threats have been baseless, the Turkish protests about internal politics and the outgrowth of “Islamist” movements a predictable result of the “Arab Spring” which she supported.

Perhaps, like George W. Bush, we should unilaterally invade some “Islamist” leaning country such as the ones she mentions, “Mali, Indonesia, Pakistan or Iraq” in order to stop the Islamist leaning? Oh, snap, we did that. In Iraq, one of the countries she mentions.

We purchased a war with a tax reduction for wealthy Americans. We did this by putting our children massively in debt and destroying the surplus termed the “lock box,” which was destined to make sure that Social Security and Medicare would be funded in perpetuity.

What would she have the President do domestically? In her Creators.com blog of June 1, 2011 entitled “Why Obama’s Economy Won’t Improve” she asserts that, “the President and his advisors should not be surprised, because this economy has not been about growth, it has been about fairness” Fairness sounds like one of our most cherished ideals as Americans. We should abandon “fairness” for growth? Ms. Charen went to the most exclusive all-female college in the country, Barnard College, where she must have learned how important it is to be wealthy at the cost of fairness for the rest of us. I can’t agree with that.

She was wrong about our economy improving: it has. On May 16, 2013 politically and economically conservative Forbes Magazine praised the recovery in its article entitled, “Economically, Could Obama be America’s Best President”.

So Ms. Charen is so wrong, on so many issues. Her ignorance regarding cowboy-type intervention in foreign wars and deft guidance of our own economy has put her in the category of “blow-hard conservative pundits” like Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman. Really?

We can do without these inflammatory, idiotic opinions. She makes a lot of money with these opinions, which I fear The Mining Journal pays to publish. The only incompetence Mona Charen has displayed is her own.